3 Ways To Monetize Your Blog

Friday, December 26th, 2008 at 10:58 am

Monetizing your blog seems to create confusion for new bloggers. This post is a result of this question which I received.

I have a WordPress blog but I don’t know how to monetize it. All the affiliate codes just say “copy the code and paste it to your blog.” Question is: Where would I paste it? I’ve asked several sources this question and the answer is the same: On your blog page.

Would that mean then that each time I post a blog, I have to manually paste these codes? Isn’t there a better way of doing it?

Now because of the question I am just going to address three ways to monetize your blog with an affiliate promotion. There are plenty of other ways like selling advertisements, Adsense, etc.

First lets look at the different types of code you may get from an affiliate program. The easiest to use is a banner code.

Using Banners

You can use a banner 2 different ways. The first is to add it to the sidebar. That way it will show automatically in each post and page.

Caveat:You must know the size of your sidebar before picking a banner. Picking a banner larger than your sidebar and adding it there may throw your whole theme out of whack. (One of my technical terms ) All terms for where to place this are based on the latest version of WordPress – 2.7.

The easiest way to add a banner to your sidebar is to go to appearance – widgets in your dashboard. Add a text widget to your sidebar. Click edit on the new text box, add a title and then paste in the banner code from the affiliate program. Save changes and the banner will display on all posts and pages depending on your theme.

You may want to enter some formatting code of your own like a center tag depending on how it displays on your blog. This is a once and done process.

You can also use banners in your post it self. If you wanted the same banner to show on each post you could add it to the theme itself or there are banner rotator plugins you could use to not have to touch the php code.

Usually if I am writing a review of a product I add the banner in by hand to the post. The only thing to be sure of if doing that is to make sure that you are in the html portion of the editor when adding the code not the text portion.

Direct linking

This is probably the way that I use the most. While writing the post I just create a hyperlink to the affiliate program directly.

To do this while using the text editor just highlight the portion you want to link and click the symbol for adding a hyperlink, fill in the url and set the target and title then click save.

Automated linking

There are a few plugins that allow you to create an automatic hyperlink out of any term on your blog. I won’t give a how to on these as each is a bit different.

It will take the specific word and make it link to anywhere you want it to go. Most of the free plugins will only link off of your own blogroll.

There is a paid plugin that I like called Easy WP Affiliate which I use on a variety of niche blogs. It works well to take specific keywords and make them link to a specific affiliate product and not have to be part of the blogroll. You get the ability to set how often it will link in each post so if the term shows multiple times you can set it for just the first, just the first two, etc.

This works well if you are creating lots of quality content on a specific topic and not doing specific reviews.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold